Revisiting Qumran Cave 1Q and its Archaeological Assemblage

Qumran Cave 1Q was the first site of Dead Sea scroll discoveries. Found and partly emptied by local Bedouin, the cave was excavated officially in 1949 and published in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (Volume 1) in 1955. Contents of the cave are found in collections worldwide, and in different institutions in Jerusalem and Amman. While the scrolls are the most highly prized artefacts from this cave, in archaeological terms they are part of an assemblage that needs to be understood holistically in order to make conclusions about its character and dating. This study presents all of the known items retrieved from the cave, including those that are currently lost, in order to consider what we might know about the cave prior to its emptying and the changes to its form. It constitutes preliminary work done as part of the Leverhulme funded International Network for the Study of Dispersed Qumran Caves Artefacts and Archival Sources [IN-2015-067].     

Socialisation and status quo

Richard E. Dawson and Kenneth Prewitt, Political Socialization, Little, Brown, Boston, 1969, pp. 226 + xiii, $4.50.     

Congenital scoliosis: possible causes and consequences in a skeleton from Nubia

Reports of congenital scoliosis (CS) are rare in the literature of paleopathology. This study details severe CS in the complete, well preserved skeleton of an adult male, dated to AD 550–800, from the Sudanese site of Kulubnarti. This skeleton, designated as S‐16, is the most complete archaeologically derived example of CS to be documented. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Building Barricades: the Political Transfer of a Contentious Roadblock

This article traces the origins of the barricade as one of the most widespread and powerful political symbols of the international socialist labour movement. As a practical instrument of urban revolt barricades have a long history that seems indissolubly linked with Paris. The Paris Commune of 1871 marked the end of an ‘Age of Revolution’ in France. At the same time, however, the Commune constituted a crucial factor for the international transfer of the barricade as a political symbol that would be used and understood by socialists and their opponents worldwide. Socialist international remembrance and veneration of the Paris Commune became the key factor in the international dissemination of the barricade, not only as a symbol but also as an instrument of battle. The mythical representations of the Parisian barricades, in images, in speeches by party officials, in political literature and poetry, informed urban rioters in places were the barricade hitherto had been an unknown phenomenon.     

Context, curation, and bias: an evaluation of the Middle Paleolithic collections of Combe-Grenal (France)

The site of Combe-Grenal is arguably the reference site for the Mousterian of southwest France. Bordes excavated the site over a period of 13 years and generated a large collection of lithics and fauna from a deep series of 64 Lower and Middle Paleolithic levels. Though Bordes only partially published his work at the site, its long stratigraphic sequence and particularly its collections have been subjected to numerous studies over the years and have figured prominently in several long-running debates concerning the Mousterian. Recently, the authors undertook a project to inventory and analyzed these collections along with the documentation of their archaeological context. In so doing, however, a number of serious problems became apparent with the collection in its current state, problems that cannot easily be resolved given the state of the available documentation. These problems have important implications not only for results of studies based on these collections, but more generally, they also point to problems in terms of how archaeological collections are curated.